IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- A closer examination of a study on verbal and non-verbal messages
The findings of a study on verbal and non-verbal messages in communication by Albert Mehrabian and his colleagues at UCLA in 1967 have been quoted so frequently that they are now often regarded as a self-evident truth.
- The women scientists of Bologna
The 18th century was a time of logic and experimentation and many of the sciences had their beginnings at that time. But throughout most of Europe, these studies were reserved exclusively for men. Few options were ava...
- The Role of Mothers in the Origins of Music
In a recent lecture Richard Parncutt, a professor of systematic musicology at the University of Graz, Austria, discussed the idea that music originated from 'motherese' - the playful voices mothers adopt when speaking...
- Mapping the Mind
The often used phrase 'I'll believe it when I see it' betrays a very intimate fact of human nature. We are visual creatures and we rely on sight to serve as a judge of what is real and what is not. When discussing the...
- Sydney Opera House
In 1956 the Premier of New South Wales, Australia, announced an international competition for the design of an opera house for Sydney. It attracted more than 200 entries from around the world and was won by Jørn Utzon...
- Pacific Navigation and Voyaging
The many tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean had no human population until ancestors of today’s islanders sailed from Southeast Asia in ocean-going canoes approximately 2,000 years ago. At the present time, the debate c...
- The Significant Role of Mother Tongue in Education
One consequence of population mobility is an increasing diversity within schools. To illustrate, in the city of Toronto in Canada, 58% of kindergarten pupils come from homes where English is not the usual language of...
- Born to Trade
Humans are born to trade and we don’t need shops or money to do it—the heart of commerce is an instinctive ability for what anthropologists call “reciprocity”. This is an ability to exchange goods of equal worth, and...
- Rubber
The plants that produce rubber are spread right across the globe, and grow in many different habitats. One might think it likely, therefore, that humankind has known about rubber for thousands of years. Yet, unlike ot...
- Investment in Shares vs. Investment in Other Assets
It all began in 1958 with a phone call from Louis Engel, a banker at Merrill Lynch, a US-based financial management company, who wanted to know how investors in shares had performed relative to investors in other asse...
- When people are ‘deaf’ to music
Music has long been considered a uniquely human concept. In fact, most psychologists agree that music is a universal human instinct. Like any ability, however, there is great variation in people’s musical competence....
- Some views on the use of headphones
To visit a typical modern office today is to walk into a room with possibly a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of younger workers listen to music on their headphones, and nearly...
- Footprints in the Mud
Everybody knows that the dinosaurs became extinct as a result of a large asteroid; something big hit the Earth 65 million years ago and, when the dust had fallen, so had the great reptiles. There is thus a nice, if ir...
- Marketing and Mind Control
While there had been a long tradition of giving rings as a commitment to marry, the custom of giving diamond engagement rings was, to a large extent, manufactured by one of the most successful marketing campaigns in h...
- A Study of Western Celebrity
It seems that our current society cannot get enough information about the daily lives of celebrities. But how did celebrities become such an important force in our culture? While people have always shared a certain ob...
- The Rise and Fall of Detective Stories
The detective story is normally said to have begun in the fertile brain of the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), especially in his stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin. From 1859, Dupin had...
- Petrol power: an eco-revolution?
Laura Ingalls Wilder's semi-autobiographical novel *The Long Winter* describes how the inhabitants of a small town called De Smet in the American Midwest narrowly avoided starvation during the severe winter of 1880-18...
- How are deserts formed
A desert refers to a barren section of land, mainly in arid and semi-arid areas, where there is almost no precipitation and the environment is hostile for any creature to inhabit. Deserts have been classified in a num...
- The History of the Pencil
The history of the pencil starts with a violent thunderstorm. When some particularly ferocious weather struck the Lake District in North West England in the sixteenth century, locals in the village of Borrowdale disco...
- Linguistic diversity
More than half of the world's languages are at risk, but an unlikely saviour is at hand. What is an endangered language? As a rough guide, any language with fewer than 10,000 speakers is in danger. However, the total...
- Learning from the Romans
In a quest to make concrete more durable and sustainable, an international team of geologists and engineers has found inspiration in the concrete used by the ancient Romans. The chemical secrets of Roman concrete have...
- Unlocking the mystery of dreams
Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods, and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic, foretelling things to come. In ancient Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepi...
- Nanotechnology: the science of the very small
Nanoscience and nanotechnology have become very fashionable in recent times. Their prominence has inspired science fiction and raised a lot of hope and hype about the possibilities. But what exactly is nanotechnology?...
- War of the Plants
The general perception of plants is that they are defenceless when faced with threat from animals (including man), insects and other plants. This, however, is not the case. Plants are able to defend themselves against...
- Star Performers
One widely held assumption about talent is that it is a reasonably fixed characteristic and it is therefore the job of organisations to identify, recruit and retain star performers. This belief affects the way people...
- John Ray and the Study of Plants
The 17th-century English scholar and botanist John Ray was well aware that he lived through, and participated in, a profound revolution in the way people interacted with nature. In the preface to his Synopsis of Briti...
- The history of the picnic
Picnics became popular in France in the 18th century. A favourite pastime of the upper classes, they were initially purely indoor affairs, held at home or in hired rooms. It was assumed that invited guests would contr...
- What is social history?
Ever since its elevation to the status of an academic discipline, history has been very largely concerned with problems of its own making. These may be gaps which the young researcher is advised by supervisors to fill...
- What Are Dreams?
Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods, and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic. In ancient Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepius, the god of medicine, in...
- A Brief History of Ballet
Ballet originated in the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century. The nobility were treated to extravagant events, especially wedding celebrations, where dancing and music created a detailed and fascinating spectacle....